Old-school manager thrives in a new baseball age
Gibbons often overlooked since Blue Jays are rarely factor in AL pennant race
John Gibbons grew up in San Antonio, so his accent sounds as if the Texas winds are blowing straight from his mouth, and his bowlegged gait conjures images of horse-weary cowboys. Texas is embedded in his background and persona, but not in his blood.
Gibbons, the long-serving manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, is actually the scion of a family of Massachusetts optometrists, not Texas ranchers. While his formative years were spent in Texas, some of his earliest recollections are from the years when his family lived in Middleton, Mass., in a house with the Ipswich River running through the backyard.
“I’m really a New Englander,” Gibbons said in his signature Texas accent. “That’s where the jerk in me comes from.”
Gibbons, who rarely misses an opportunity for a self-deprecating joke, said the last line with a wink, knowing he was speaking to a New Englander. After all, few consider Gibbons the jerky type, even if he has unloaded on a few players and more than a few umpires over the years, sometimes in spectacular fashion.
But Gibbons is often overlooked in discussions about baseball’s best managers, perhaps because he is tucked away in Canada, or maybe because until 2015, the Blue Jays were rarely a factor in the American League pennant race.
To many who know him well, though, Gibbons is a passionate, straight-shooting, old-school baseball man whose folksy traits sometimes shroud the cerebral foundations of his success. He is equal parts regular guy, shrewd analyst and baseball lifer — characteristics that make him a bit of a dinosaur in today’s game, but also a leader many of his players adore.
“He’s like a second dad,” Russell Martin, Toronto’s veteran catcher, said. “You don’t want to disappoint him.”
In a sport in which the manager’s role is undergoing rapid change, and charismatic, independent personalities face extinction, Gibbons is an outlier, a Texas-reared son of a Massachusetts eye doctor who doesn’t fit easily into a typical category.
A former catcher with the Mets, Gibbons first managed the Blue Jays from 2004 to 2008, a period in which they never finished higher than second in the American League East. Fired in the summer of 2008, then purified through stints as the Kansas City Royals’ bench coach and as a Class AA manager in San Antonio, his hometown, he was rehired by Toronto in 2013 by its former general manager Alex Anthopoulos and has held